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Archive for March, 2016


The technical plural 109

Posted on March 14, 2016 by

A significant groundswell of opinion, perhaps:

thousands

Oddly, the Scotsman’s report on the story contains not a single further piece of data about how numerous these opponents of a second referendum are.

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Louder than lovebombs 171

Posted on March 13, 2016 by

From today’s Scottish Sunday Express:

mckinstry

“Please, Scotland, stay with us” seems a long time ago, doesn’t it?

The five key facts about GERS 216

Posted on March 13, 2016 by

[EDIT 24 August 2016: This article has now been updated here.]

It’s Sunday, so there is of course one last convulsive orgy of “BLACK HOLE!” articles in all the papers, as every Unionist hack and pundit in the land falls over themselves to portray their own country as a useless scrounging subsidy junkie without actually using the exact words “too wee, too poor, too stupid”.

Everywhere you look there’s a “Proud Scot” screaming about how Scottish revenue this year being 1% lower than it was last year has comprehensively demolished a case for independence that those same people have spent most of the last four years stridently insisting never existed in the first place.

angryyoon

So before everyone moves on to a new “SCOTLAND BAD” next week, we thought it was worth a short recap of what we’ve learned about a devolved Scotland’s financial books this week.

Because for all the complex arguments, mad comedy graphs ludicrously pretending that Scotland is a less viable nation than Greece or Latvia or Cyprus or Malta and bewildering arrays of incomprehensible stats, there are only five things you really need to know about GERS.

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The infallible OBR 167

Posted on March 12, 2016 by

Bottom story from today’s Financial Times, less than four months after the top one:

deescalate

A forecast turned out wrong? Must be the SNP’s fault somehow.

The Passenger 84

Posted on March 12, 2016 by

img186

Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.

The extraordinary untruth 237

Posted on March 11, 2016 by

We don’t normally ask you to watch videos as long as this, readers. (Although at 4m 22s it’s still not War And Peace.) As a rule the key part of any TV discussion can be boiled down to a few seconds, but this one needs to be taken in at a bit more length.

It happened on last night’s Question Time from Dundee, and was already 10 minutes into a discussion about whether there might be a second independence referendum and what might trigger it, in particular the prospect of Scotland voting to remain in the EU in June but the rest of the UK voting to leave, dragging Scotland out forcibly.

At that point, host David Dimbleby made an inexplicable intervention, abandoning his position as supposedly neutral moderator to pluck a “fact” out of thin air with which to attack the SNP’s John Swinney. Here’s what unfolded.

Wait, what?

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What are the odds? 300

Posted on March 11, 2016 by

BBC1’s weekly Question Time political debate shows are heavily over-subscribed. Only a couple of hundred tickets are typically available for would-be members of the studio audience, and far more than that apply to attend, so your chances of getting through the initial vetting are fairly slim. You’re especially unlikely to be selected if you’re not from the city where the show is being held, for obvious reasons.

qtdundee

While the group of failed Scottish Labour parliamentary candidates is, let’s say, rather larger than it used to be, it’s still a pretty select club of a few dozen people.

And if you DO make it into the QT audience, the chances of you being picked out to speak are also rather poor – not more than 1 in 10 at best, probably nearer 1 in 20.

So what happened on tonight’s edition from Dundee was quite the long shot.

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Better Together 1776 139

Posted on March 10, 2016 by

It turns out Scotland isn’t the first country to be too wee, too poor and too stupid for independence from the mighty and benificent United Kingdom.

bt1776

(Source.)

The opposite of information 133

Posted on March 10, 2016 by

Good luck with this one, folks:

guardiandeficit

All clear now?

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The shattering of the UK 153

Posted on March 10, 2016 by

Depending on which parts of the media you were reading yesterday and this morning, the economic case for independence was either “shattered” (the Herald), “demolished” (the Spectator), “shredded” (Daily Record), “smashed to smithereens” (Willie Rennie, bless) or any number of other apocalyptic metaphors for total destruction, by a 1% fall in Scottish revenues resulting from a steep drop in oil prices which led to a notional Scottish budget deficit that by some measures was as high as 10% of GDP.

ukdeficits

We must assume, then, that the economic case for the UK being an independent nation was rendered unto ruins in 2009-10, when its deficit exceeded 11% of GDP.

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One last thing to remember 74

Posted on March 09, 2016 by

The BBC’s Brian Taylor on GERS:

briantaylorgers

As we have, of course, noted before.

Gazing into the black hole 93

Posted on March 09, 2016 by

Economics: The art of explaining why all of your models fail to accurately predict either the future or the past.

It’s the time of year again when everyone glances at the first page of a dense booklet of complex economic data and immediately starts using it to make wild forecasts and proclamations despite the long-known problems with doing so.

gers16

So it’s also, once again, time to try looking a little further to tease out some details that others might have – let’s be generous here – accidentally missed.

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